Survey finds more than 40% of Americans misled about having COVID19, precautions | Hacker News Reader

Survey finds more than 40% of Americans misled about having COVID19, precautions

medicalxpress.com

7 pointsrntn4 comments

> COVID-19 safety measures can certainly be burdensome, but they work

For something to "work", you need compliance as well as actual effectiveness of the thing. Pretending that something with poor compliance because of the imposition it places on people "works" is disingenuous. We can out our heads in the sand, or look for solutions that actually work end-to-end

Those are two different analyses.

Were a culture war influencer to decide that speed limits were anti-freedom, that would not make speed limits themselves ineffective.

Compliance would surely suffer in one certain country, meaning the imposition of speed limits would lose effectiveness. That could warrant exploration of alternative implementation, policing and especially communication, I grant you that, but there simply is no alternative measure.

I get the appeal of holistic analysis, but you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What else can you do?

It's not that hard to drive safely. It's not that hard to wear a mask. I know it's not convenient, but statistically speaking you're unnecessarily killing people.

Speed limits are actually another great example of an ineffective control. I live somewhere with lots or wide straight roads that have ridiculously low speed limits, and they are ignored utterly. Sometimes you find a really big speed limit sign, as if that is the problem. I feel to some extent that it makes people drive even faster when they are absurdly low, because they're pushed so far over the line they just say screw it and ignore the limit entirely instead of feeling restrained a bit, which is probably another good covid analogy. Telling people "it's not that hard to drive safely" and then defining "safety" as something absurdly cautious and frustrating is just as unhelpful as many jurisdictions' civic guidance, and the article is providing evidence that the latter is just as useless as the former

We're screwed

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